The School of Art on Renfrew Street offers guided tours, where you mingle with art students while marvelling at one man’s extraordinary power of vision.Return to Sauchiehall Street to compare our travel agencies with the ones back home. Going Places and Trailfinders state their purpose clearly enough, but the biggest chain in Britain is mysteriously called Lunn Poly, an amalgam of Sir Henry Lunn’s Public Schools Alpine Sports Club and the Polytechnic Touring Association. You’ll also spot AT Mays (the “AT” stands for “All Travel”), a Scottish-based chain now part of the global Carlson travel empire – some of your compatriots got here first.”Sauchiehall Street on a Saturday night” was once rather unfair shorthand for a drunken, disorderly evening, but a pint of heavy (actually the same weight as Budweiser, though warmer and tastier) at Lauder’s will persuade you that civilisation prevails. You could continue to the Tron Theatre, where Macbeth is showing, in case you don’t feel there is enough blind ambition and brutal revenge inside the ASTA Convention.If your professional duties in the debating chamber allow you little time to explore, at least make the most of your lunch break. Nip across the road (actually the Clydeside Expressway) to Glasgow’s greatest concentration of free culture. That huge and ruddy Edwardian pile, as cavernous as a railway terminus and garnished with superfluous turrets, is the Kelvingrove Museum and Art Gallery. Though exuding a severe paternalism, the museum also captures the scale and ambition of a city at the peak of its power.To find out why America, not Scotland, is now the wealthiest country in the world, make your final call at the Museum of Transport.

It begins with tales of maritime catastrophes like the sinking of the Comet ferry “… by which melancholy circumstance 70 human beings were in a single moment precipitated into Eternity”. Journalism is not what it used to be.Having started with transportation disasters, the museum continues in the same vein with the Sinclair C5 – a miniature plastic car about a millionth the size of a Cadillac. That only slightly larger, curiously squared-off vehicle is a Hillman Imp. You might be surprised to learn that this Scottish- built car sold nearly half a million, presumably all of which had the usual modification of placing a couple of house bricks in the front boot (trunk) of the rear-engined beast to impart a degree of road-holding.The British make do; Glasgow will make you welcome.. Watered-down petrol; elephants snoozing on Nepalese roads; zealous customs officials in Iran – a few of the more exotic hazards facing the 96 vehicles which this morning embark on the ultimate motoring challenge.

Not Peterborough to Perth by Porsche, nor Poole to Preston in a Polo; next time you curse the prospect of a long and difficult journey, imagine driving the 10,000 miles from Peking to Paris in a 1960 Morris Minor. This morning, a comprehensively modified version of the English classic will set off from the Chinese capital, destination Place de la Concorde. The Peking-to-Paris challenge is organised by the Oxfordshire-based Classic Rally Association. A motley fleet of great, good and plain dodgy cars is setting off to emulate the first great international rally. In 1907, a seven-litre Italia driven by Prince Borghese took the honours on the first Peking to Paris run – a 60-day haul across continents where the need for roads had not yet been recognised.

A hapless British journalist spent the journey sitting on the vehicle’s tool box, reputedly filing copy by writing the story then placing it in a bottle and hurling it at an unsuspecting local, with instructions to telegraph the contents to London.
Today’s contestants, who hail from 22 countries, will enjoy the benefits of satellite communication They have it easy – but not that easy. The briefing session, held at the Brooklands circuit in Surrey three months ago, was enough to put off all but the most motivated.The organisers have spiced up the challenge by routing the rally across the bleak Tibetan plateau. Lord Montagu’s 1915 Vauxhall Prince may struggle with the rarified atmosphere three miles up in the Tibetan Himalayas. Shortly afterwards, past Everest base camp in Nepal, the competitors can expect to encounter the first immovable objects of the elephantine variety – the animals apparently enjoy sleeping on warm Tarmac.The descent from Kathmandu into Delhi is scheduled to take three days, during which drivers will plunge from a region where humans are as rare as the high-altitude air to one where, to quote an organiser: “As soon as you stop you’ll be surrounded by people.” Heaven knows what they will make of a 1967 Ford Anglia Estate, though the 1966 Wolseley 24/80 should provide comfortable resonances of the Hindustan Ambassador, the car of preference in the Indian capital.Delhi to Lahore is likely to be vehemently hot and tiring. Given the multiplicity of hazards on this busy stretch, the rally’s timing will be suspended.Timing is not quite such an issue as it was in 1907.

The organisers stress that the competition is against the elements and schedules rather than against each other; it is not a race. The main aim is to reach Paris, with a secondary target of incurring as few penalty points as possible.There are many rivers to cross – and lots of them have no bridges. The advice to drivers is to send the co-driver in to check the depth, not forgetting to tie a rope to him or her first. Some of the more assertive vehicles can try to drive across, but for the Morris Minor level of entrant it is probably safer to drag the car through. If all fails, help is following an hour or two behind in the shape of a rescue vehicle. This brute will tow you out of deep water or thick mud, though of course the penalty points start racking up.Iran gets little praise internationally these days, but the country is reckoned to be a motorists’ paradise compared with the preceding terrain.